Sunday, August 29, 2010

The last Supper

The Boss's plane departs tomorrow morning at a mind numbingly early hour, and since it's an international flight, we need to be at the airport at a time I didn't even know existed. The only people that should be allowed to be up at this time of the morning are night watchmen and milk delivery guys. Since she will be traveling over Easter, she decided that tonight I should cook a nice dinner, take a long walk with the hounds, and get to bed early..

We live in the biggest county in Alabama, in the dead center of this county is an awe inspiring force. A force so powerful, so terrible, and so evil, that it is poised to take over the world.. Walmart. Walmart is a place like no other on planet earth. Walmart pretends to be a simple store that you enter under your own free will, pick items you freely choose from the ample selection on the rows upon rows of merchandise, speedily pay for these items using a convenient variety of methods, and depart on your merry way. All the while, saving great piles of money by paying the lowest prices available. But, Walmart is much more then that. Much more..

There is a special device buried deep under each and every Walmart store. This device was invented by Sam Walton under very secret circumstances. No one else knows this device exists, but I have figured it out. Once started, the device takes over your mind, and you find it impossible to avoid entering the store. You don't even realize that it's happening, but you leave your house with full intentions of doing something fun and exciting, and suddenly find yourself in the center of a Walmart store. I know this to be true, as it happened to me again today..

Apart from almost magically teleporting you into the nearest store, Sam Walton's special secret device also makes you loose all rational thought and monetary judgment, and you walk through the isles zombie like, shoveling unneeded and unwanted items into your over-sized cart. This force is so powerful that the stores never close, as anyone traveling within a 23 mile radius, no matter what the time of day, is magically sucked in. If they closed the stores through the night hours, all the truckers in America would be piled up at their jumbo doors in the morning and freight delivery would come to a standstill. As proof, just think about the distance between each store in your area, and their relative locations to Interstates and major thoroughfares.

Sam Walton's device has some negative side effects that he didn't count on however.. It turns normally well behaved children into screaming, whaling banshees. This is because the device does not work on the young. They are aware of what is happening, and somehow understand that there will never be a collage fund due to the everyday low prices. The device also somehow brings long lost best friends together who insist on catching up on the past 15 years in the center of the soup isle, blocking your ability to load 32 cans of Cream of Mushroom Soup into your buggy. There is also something going on with way too tight clothes and bad hygiene, but I haven't quite figured that part out yet.

Since The Boss demanded a dinner, I had it in the back of my mind that we needed to pick up a few things. I made the mental list; potatoes, butter, milk, and a desert. A few simple items I could pick up at our corner inconvenience store after spending the afternoon at the golf course. The Boss and I put on our plaid knickers, striped shirts, sweater vests and knee-high stockings, load the clubs into the hound mobile and head out to the links. The next thing I remember, I am standing next to a screaming child, in a line of glass eyed shoppers holding a cart filled to over flowing with a nonsensical assortment of items. There is a TV, one car tire, 63 cans of stewed tomatoes, 4 gallons of frozen strawberries, two fish swimming in a clear plastic bag, and a police issue megaphone. The cashier is saying "Sir? Sir? I said that was $1,463.26. Is that cash or would you like to use your Walmart card?".

After I put all the items away, and cleared 15 pounds of white plastic bags from the kitchen floor I started to make dinner. It would have been good, but we were out of potatoes, butter, and milk..

About Me

We come from a small town in Northern Canada, and we are active in Greyhound welfare and adoption. We lived and traveled extensively in the deep south for many years and had the opportunity to work with adoptable greyhounds at the race track while living in Alabama.